Nearly There

So the final deadline is tomorrow and as you can probably imagine, today was spent pretty much attached to the computer other than meals etc. After looking at the output of my text processing assignment more clearly and comparing it to the 'gold standard' provided by the lecturer, I wasn't fairing too well. Although some of the outputs matched, they were in the wrong order and didn't seem to take into account some of the queries. After playing around with the regular expressions for about five hours - at one point I left the program to build the index after modifying it and decided to give up after it had not generating anything after two hours. I ended up back at square one having decided that the regular expressions were not the problem and that it was my calculations of the document vectors (the ranking calculations) that were the real cause of the problem. By this time however it was approaching 03:00am and I had only just managed to get my head around the equations the first time around so attempting it again in this state would have been fairly futile. I resigned to the fact that I would pick the marks up for the code and that the lecturer would notice the mistake I made (which would hopefully be a small one) and I wouldn't lose out on too many marks. I just hope he's marking it on the code and not the report which I cobbled together, not quite understanding what I was meant to write and what the numbers output by the comparison program actually meant. Maximum of three pages was the brief and so I made two big graphs and stretched the content out onto two with the graph analyses as vague as they could be, pretending I knew what they meant.

I will admit that I was perhaps a little bit distracted during and after dinner. As we are coming to the end our stay in Sheffield, it seems a waste to go for a big shop and as such we are each finding our own meals (rather than group cooking as we sometimes do). I was bored of work and so decided to be a little bit experimental. I'd had the idea for chicken pies for a while but never got round to making them so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. About thirty minutes playing with some puff pastry and I had two ramekins all made up and two tops to fit. I made the filling and shoved them in the oven with my fingers crossed that they would turn out alright. Amazingly when I checked them after about ten minutes, they were done. I'm used to waiting much much longer for the pastry to rise and brown but I think I rolled it out a bit thin and as such, it cooked much quicker. Didn't quite get the gravy right - a bit too strong - because I'd used a whole chicken OXO for just me. I should have used half but half OXOs are pretty useless so I just chucked a whole one in. With hindsight, I could have mellowed it a little with some milk but that has literally only just occurred to me as I write this sentence.

I decided to boycott the X-Factor final after hearing that it would be a two hour show for what is essentially a five or ten minute job. The 'special guests' that were lined up turned out to be a collection of artists who were probably contractually obliged to jump on command from Mr Cowell. With the exception of Macca and George that is but the latter was no surprise as he sung with Joe yesterday and Robbie and Bublé have already done their stint. I was hoping for something more than simply the last couple of finalists, okay so they are big stars now - well two of them are at least, I'm excluding Alexandra since she is still under the X-Factor contract and hasn't exactly 'gone global'. On a lighter side, the right person won and all I can hope now is that he will go on to produce some original music rather than simply releasing an album of crappy covers. On the subject of which, who's idea was it to choose a Miley Cyrus cover - and a recent one at that - as the single? I know covers are popular with the manufactured genre but this was only released by the original artist earlier on in the year and it's not even that good a song. Part of me wants the X-Factor Christmas No1 thing to stop and get beaten by Rage Against The Machine but then I think it would be a shame for this to be the first X-Factor contestant to fail to make the No1 spot. On top of that, I don't really like RATM and would rather see another song make it up there instead.

Whilst waiting for my indexes to build, I came across Amanda Holden's new 'comedy' (and I use the word in its loosest sense) venture, Big Top. Well I think that introduction pretty much sums up what I think about it and I don't need to say any more really. It was mildly entertaining and since this week could possibly be the most boring week of the year, I will continue to watch the series and let you know if it gets any better. For the moment though, you can rest safe in the knowledge that you aren't missing much. There, never say I don't do anything for you - I just saved you half an hour or so.